On Sep 17, 2004, at 11:39 AM, Mark Probert wrote:
> Perhaps we could take a favorite book, "Programming Pearls" by Jon
> Bently
> and use some of the puzzles contained therein. For example, from page
> 11:
I'm unfamiliar with this book, but it's looking good so far. Pick a
favorite problem or three and submit then to
rubyquiz / grayproductions.net when you have a chance.
> "Given a dictionary of English words, find all sets of anagrams. For
> instance, "pots", "stop" and "tops" are all anagrams of one another
> because
> each can be formed by permuting the letters of the others."
>
> And its related question:
>
> "Consider the problem of finding all the anagrams of a given input
> word.
> How could you solve this problem given the word and the dictionary?
> What
> if you could spend some time and space to process the dictionary before
> answering the query?"
The Perl Quiz of the Week has done some fun problems along these lines.
My favorite was a word ladder problem where you find all the words
from say "house" to "shack", varying only a single letter at each step.
All words along the way also had to be in the dictionary.
It looks as if the CodeKatas may have also included this one. It
seemed to be mentioned on the Wiki, though I didn't see it in the blog.
Word problems are always fun. Hopefully, we'll have some good ones
too...
James Edward Gray II